


safety net.

by porcelainsimplicity



Category: X-Men (Movies), X-Men (Movieverse), X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) - Fandom
Genre: Gen, Losing track of time, M/M, Slowly losing his mind, Stuck in a prison cell, inner thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-21
Updated: 2014-06-21
Packaged: 2018-02-05 13:18:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,718
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1819858
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/porcelainsimplicity/pseuds/porcelainsimplicity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>there's no one to catch me here.</p>
            </blockquote>





	safety net.

Counting the seconds down,  
Crossing the numbers off,  
To when I can hold you again.  
Staring at plain white walls,  
Missing familiar laughs,  
They always made me feel at home.  
I wish I could see a familiar face,  
I'm out of my comfort zone,  
Surrounded but I feel so alone,  
I wish I could fall into your safety net once again.  
There's no one to catch me here.  
natalie holmes – safety net  


He doesn't know how long he's been there. He thinks it has been a couple of months, but then again, it could be a couple of years. He cannot tell whether it is day or night, fluorescent lights hanging high above the glass ceiling always on. It could be three o'clock in the morning or three o'clock in the afternoon. He has no idea.

It's not just his sense of time that has abandoned him; he's pretty sure his mind went with it. Staring at the same stark concrete walls day after day after day will do that to you. He hasn't been allowed so much as a pencil to draw onto the walls, or to keep track of how long he's been there. But the reason he thinks he's lost his mind has nothing to do with the passing of time or the lack of a pencil.

It has everything to do with Charles Xavier.

When he'd first been locked away in this cell, he thought that he'd surely hear Charles's voice echo through his head soon. Charles would want to know if he'd really done it, if he'd really killed the president. He wouldn't just blindly believe what they were saying. Charles knew he'd committed some atrocities in his life, but they were in the search of one man who had committed as many atrocities against him. He was convinced that Charles wouldn't think he had killed an innocent man just because of the fact that he could.

But then he never heard Charles's voice.

Except he did hear Charles's voice. He heard Charles telling him how they had the chance to be the better men, and how stupid he sounded when he responded that they already were. He heard the happiness in Charles's voice every time he said checkmate, and the faked misery in his whenever he lost. He heard Charles's voice from that very first night, telling him he wasn't alone.

Except now he was alone. He was completely and totally alone.

He thought he'd never have to be alone again after meeting Charles. He'd found a kindred spirit, one who shared his ideals, one who wanted mutants to be recognized the way they should be.

Except they hadn't wanted the same things. Charles wanted diplomacy and discussion, to bore the humans to death with scientific terms and explanations. Erik wanted to put the humans in their place as the inferior species, make them understand that a new cycle had begun and it was now mutants who would rule the world.

So he'd left Charles's side and a little more than a year later, he found himself in this concrete prison, with no metal within touching distance. He couldn't even pick up faint magnetic fields. His gift was lying dormant, and he knew the lack of usage would soon make him physically ill. 

That's what had happened when he was a child, when he tried to hide the fact that he could manipulate metal from everyone. Not using his gift had made him physically ill, only cured by taking the metal around the end of a pencil and stretching it out every possible way he could. The more he used his gift, the better he felt, and he vowed then and there that he would never suppress his gift again.

But there was no metal anywhere around here, and he was starting to get a headache from not being able to at least feel the magnetic fields he could manipulate so easily now. He doubted the guards would allow him any type of medical care should he become violently ill. They'd probably just leave him there to die.

So he'd started meditating. Sitting cross-legged in the middle of his cell and pretending he was surrounded by metal. He used his mind to stretch the metal out, to manipulate it in the way he was used to. The more he did it, the more he felt he could manipulate the mental metal, and the more he wondered if he'd finally found that place between rage and serenity that Charles had been talking about.

Charles. Sometimes he'd reach his mind out as best he could, trying to send a signal to Charles that he was there, he was waiting, he was desperate. He was sorry for what had happened on the beach, he was sorry that he'd just walked away from his injured friend, he was sorry that he'd destroyed everything that had existed between them.

They'd acted on it only once, in a quiet hotel room in the middle of nowhere that felt like it was a room at the end of the world. It took them both a lot of drinks for courage, but then they were in each other's arms, lips pressed together, clothes being ripped off, laughing as they collapsed onto the bed. Charles had never done anything like that before, but he had, so he guided Charles through it.

And it was glorious and wonderful and every adjective that existed in the world to describe happy things. But they'd never done it again after that night, and while Erik always wondered why, during his meditations, he thought he discovered the answer.

Charles was scared. Charles, who thought all mutants' abilities were fascinating and was never scared of them. Charles, who knew what everyone was thinking without even trying. Charles, who looked at him that night in that hotel room and flat out told Erik that he was scared.

He doesn't think that the physicality scared him. Instead, Erik was convinced that it was the emotional attachment that did.

Charles hadn't had many relationships. He knew that. Charles had told him that. And Charles had never even had a friendship the way he and Erik had. His relationship with Raven was far different to his relationship with Erik. Raven had been someone to protect, someone to mold into whatever Charles thought was best for her. Erik, on the other hand, had been as hard as steel, unmoving and unchangeable.

Yet Charles still thought he could change him. And maybe he did change him. He had seen good in him when Erik didn't think there was anything left. He hadn't blinked as Erik told him the things he'd done to hunt down Schmidt or Shaw or whatever they decided his name actually was. Even after all of that, Charles had faith in him when he had no faith in himself.

Which is what made Charles's silence more bizarre to Erik. Charles had always had faith in him. And he knew that the beach had been a disaster in the end, and he knew that Charles had been paralyzed from the shot because Emma had told him so, but he hadn't ever thought Charles would lose faith in him. Charles wouldn't give that up because he believed the government, would he?

But as the days went by and the silence stayed, Erik started to believe that he had.

Charles had been his safety net. His backup plan. If his ideas failed, he'd go back to Charles and tell him that he realized he was wrong. But now he'd fallen, fallen a very long way, but there was no Charles there to stop his fall. 

He had hoped the others would find their way back to Charles. But then the pictures began to come. Stuck in his food tray, staring up at him through the plastic. Mutant after mutant. Some he knew, some he didn't. All of them were dead. And he'd seen enough in the concentration camp to know they'd been experimented on. Mutilated. Day after day, the pictures would come.

And as much as he hated it, every day a small part of him felt relief that it wasn't a picture of Charles.

He mourned them all. He didn't know what they had been captured and experimented on for. He wasn't sure he would ever know, because his prospects of getting out of this godforsaken prison cell seemed to dwindle with every passing second. He'd failed them. All of them. He had failed them and Charles had failed them too. He realized that when the photo of Banshee showed up. He was supposed to be safe with Charles. 

What the fuck was going on with Charles? 

That's when he started to think that Charles had died. It was the only thing that made sense. Charles wasn't in his head, Charles wasn't in the photos, mutants who were supposed to be safe with Charles were now dead. And he mourned his friend the most. Because they hadn't just been friends, they'd been a whole lot more.

He was devastated.

Meditation became his savior. The only thing that kept him from tearing apart their concrete and plastic cell with his bare hands. He would meditate, he would remember, and he would mourn.

Then came the note. _Mind the glass._ He looked up and saw a guard leaning over the glass, and then he started to hear the rumble, and before he knew it, the glass was crashing down around him. This guard, whoever he was, was going to break him out.

It turned out to be a kid instead of a guard, and he talked almost as fast as he moved, and he wore the most ridiculous silver outfit that Erik had ever seen.

Then the elevator opened, and Charles was there. He got Charles's name out of his mouth before the punch came, and all he could think of was that he deserved it. He deserved that punch.

He hadn't deserved to be locked up in that cell for what had to have been years based on Charles's appearance, but he deserved that punch.

Charles was there.

Charles was breaking him out.

He didn't know why, and it didn't really matter in the end, but his safety net had finally caught him.


End file.
